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‘Star Wars’ will brighten a galaxy

Brian Truitt; @briantruitt, USA TODAY
8:20 p.m. EDT July 28, 2014

From left: Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in a scene from the film “Star Wars.’’ Jason Aaron and artist John Cassaday kick off Marvel Comics’ line of comic books based on the sci-fi franchise in January.
(Photo:
20th Century Fox
)

Jason Aaron is putting his Darth Vader carrying case packed full of vintage Star Wars action figures to good use again, probably for the first time since he was a kid.

Aaron and artist John Cassaday kick off Marvel Comics’ line of comic books based on the sci-fi franchise in January with Star Wars, the first of three titles launching in 2015.

Marvel, which takes over the Star Wars license for comics from Dark Horse Comics, also is releasing a pair of tie-in books to expand the universe: the ongoing Star Wars: Darth Vader by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Salvador Larroca, out in February; and the five-issue miniseries Star Wars: Princess Leia by writer Mark Waid and artist Terry Dodson, due in March.

The new stories take place just after the Battle of Yavin at the end of the original 1977 Star Wars movie, and Aaron’s comic catches up with Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and droids C-3PO and R2-D2 a couple weeks after the destruction of the Empire’s all-powerful Death Star.

Aaron considers Star Wars a team book of sorts, but initially Luke is the engine that powers the narrative.

Meanwhile, Darth Vader is trying to figure who this kid is who took down their mighty space station, Aaron says. “You’ve got them chasing after each other without realizing they’re chasing each other.”

In the main Star Wars book, Vader is an unstoppable force the Rebel Alliance is avoiding, though he seems to be everywhere.

Conversely, in the Darth Vader series, “that’s what he does on Tuesdays,” Gillen says with a laugh. “He is desperately overworked, and he is trying to do so much stuff between what he’s doing for the Emperor and doing what he needs to do to create his own thing.”

The explosive fate of the Death Star has taken Vader out of favor in the Empire and maybe disgraced him, too. However, Gillen sees the time gap he’s working in between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back as the richest in implied stories, and he’s come up with a “fall and rise of Darth Vader” structure not unlike that of Frank Underwood in the Netflix series House of Cards: “A man who’s worked inside a system for a long time, feels slighted by it and now turns to methods that he wouldn’t always have done previously.”

In Waid’s Princess Leia series, the heroine sets out on a mission through the galaxy to gather up any other survivors there may have been from Alderaan, which was destroyed via Death Star. They’ve been scattered among the stars, and Leia wants to reunite them.

“Our story,” says Waid, “is essentially that she can either choose to be the princess of nothing or she can own up to her responsibilities and, as a leader, politician and princess, do what she can to rebuild Alderaan.”